Implementing wireless for your hospital

The Need For Wireless

Patients increasingly have options when choosing a hospital, especially when choosing high profit services such as elective surgery. In addition, patients are more educated about the options they have, may spend time doing research on healthcare providers, and while their first priority is quality medical care, an increasingly important consideration is the availability of wireless Internet at their chosen hospital. Today's younger generation grew up with the Internet, and they expect it to be available at places such as coffee shops, restaurants, and even hospitals. Many won't even consider a stay at a hospital without free wireless Internet for their laptop computer and cell phone.

As a healthcare provider you may be missing out on patient decisions and not even know why. It is becoming imperitive that hospitals provide wireless Internet to their patients, or watch as these patients, especially the ones with good jobs and good insurance, choose hospitals that do provide this increasing important service.

Wireless Security

But how do you implement wireless technology in your hospital that is available not only for your patients, but also for your staff. How do you secure and protect valuable healthcare information from unauthorized access?

Putting in a few independent wireless access points is a recipe for disaster and information loss. We often see smaller hospitals purchase off-the-shelf consumer wireless access points or routers and install them in strategic areas in the hospital for internal use. While they may use tools such as WEP encryption and user logins to protect access, there is typically not a unified, integrated approach to managing wireless access.

Dealing with Rogue Access Points

Securing your wireless network requires more than passwords and encryption. Picture a visitor to your hospital purchasing a low cost access point at the local Walmart. They bring it to your hospital, find an open Ethernet port, plug in the access point and from then on they have free, unathorized, virtually undetectable access to your hospital network. Or picture a more likely scenario where an employee does the same thing so they have wireless access in their department. Yet since they are not IT professionals, their departmentally administered access point is open to the public.

With a Sonicwall integrated wireless system, rogue access points like those mentioned above are detected and isolated from the network, and the network administrator is sent an email as soon as a rogue access point is detected. This ensure that any wireless device on your network is authorized and secure.

Implementing a Secure Wireless Strategy

To help customers implement a secure wireless strategy small to mid-sized hospital, InTelemed recommends Sonicwall products such as the NSA series of of firewalls, coupled with Sonicpoint wireless access points. A Sonicwall firewall can act as the central management point for your entire wireless network - blocking rogue access points, securing both hospital staff devices and wireless guests - patients with laptops on smart phones. The Sonicwall NSA firewalls isolate wireless traffic from normal network traffic and only allow authorized wireless traffic to enter the internal hospital network. It can also manage bandwidth so a patient laptop cannot monopolize bandwidth needed by legitimate hospital applications.

In summary, InTelemed can work with small to mid sized hospitals to help you deliver secure wireless networking to not only your internal users, but also your patients and guests. This can help increase your patient count and most importantly, your overall revenue.